Organ Donor Awareness Week takes place this week. With up to 600 people in Ireland awaiting organ transplants, Organ Donor Awareness Week aims to highlight the benefits of carrying a donor card.

This week we would like to highlight the tremendous service that our Nephrology and Renal Transplantation teams in Beaumont Hospital provide to the renal patients in their care. The national kidney transplant service is located at Beaumont hospital and in 2017, 192 kidney transplants were performed (an increase of 20 in 2016), 51 of which were from living donors. That’s a lot of people whose lives have been transformed from kidney donation. The opening of our new Dialysis Therapies Centre last year has proved to be a additional welcome addition to the service, providing our dialysis patients with a state of the art environment in which to continue their treatment.